


American Beauty Fusion - A Grocery List

by displacedsquid



Category: American Beauty (1999), Supernatural
Genre: Age mash up, Alternate Universe, American Beauty AU, Angst, Crack, F/M, Fallen Angels, Fanart, Gen, M/M, Snapshots, Sort of:, Word salad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-05
Updated: 2014-01-05
Packaged: 2018-01-07 13:45:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1120570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/displacedsquid/pseuds/displacedsquid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He sees Dean, suspended in the air, back pressed against the ceiling in a sea of ex-roses. </p><p>Hello, Dean, says his mind, groggy and water-logged. It processes a spectacular rain of red.</p>
            </blockquote>





	American Beauty Fusion - A Grocery List

**Author's Note:**

  * For [static_abyss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/static_abyss/gifts).



**__ **

**__ **

**_9.5_ **

_Charlie just wants a scrap of an adventure already - any small triumphant slice to reset her heart and make it sing._

_It’s too quiet in here._

_**9.7**  
_

_She flees whenever she fears._

_Every mission means **run** , albeit this time It's outwards. _ _She finds her mind drawn in worn down lines, frazzled in cold short circuits. N _o points left._ She’s looking for a spark, that's all._

_Too bad her parents have sticks up their asses, welded in place, ridiculously well inserted. They’re frigid, neglectful, traditional, and her mum’s a bitch, and her dad’s a disaster._

_He's taciturn, pop-culture-blind, emotes through a haze of botox on steroids, stares through the soul of every girlfriend she brings home, and he's nearly never there._

_They're lame-os._

_Someone should just, put them both out of their misery._

 

  ** _9.9_ **

_"Want me to help you figure it out with hugs and feelings?" says Sam, as he carefully tucks an eye roll behind his blink._

_Charlie twitches._

* * *

**0**

Beyond the red door of a house on Robin Hood Trail, the roses are dying.

They’d meant to come again in the summer.

Instead, the stone wall, weathered and dry as the sole leaf that flutters against it slumbers under a curtain of naked vines, strangling themselves in unslidable knots. They’d thickened together, bloomed, and bonded, yet this last leaf, cracked, stiffening into fragility, is ready to take off - to soar into pieces. Its spray clutches at it, urging a harder cling to identity.

The home stems look too thin and gray to survive.

It’s not a quite dead garden yet though. The Gorses, slightly withered, remain vibrant with insects. They perch in their sunny yellows, whispering whiffs of coconuts amidst buzzing choirs. Each pulsing hum is heard and memorized, as bees trail after fixed, precise routes plotted for their kin to endure and survive.

If worse comes to worst, all can be rebuilt; green pencil point by green pencil point poking out of the mud.

 

**1**

Castiel is winning his staring contest against the bees by a mile. 

Naomi ignores him.

She’s too busy.

She's too busy wearing the perfect makeup, too busy rewiring the world's minds by searing through their bones until her very sentences glow from them, too busy to spare Castiel a glance.

She’s going to reestablish the word.

Her faith is blinding.

**2**

It’s a force that Castiel remembers being drawn to once - its definitive surge as she claimed her causes, her several different sides, her fights - taken up vigorously. Even now as she falls to the end of her paths near terminal velocity, each landing stays guided by the book...yet she pursues her ideals in such wildness that every step dispenses marred ashes upon the wind.

Perhaps it’s the new desk job.

He considers slithering away, sidewinding to reduce points of contact to the boiled sand.

**_-1_ **

_One day, she adopts Charlie._

_Castiel stays._

**3**

Teeth settle into a sweet smile, sharp, straight, charming and utterly poisonous. The morning finds Naomi beaming, eyes narrowing in a deliberately relaxed squint.

Two men, one wearing a moustache, and the other a V-neck beam back at her. Behind them, the entire playmate army from the 90s, and three Christs, cosplayed by cats echo their movements.

Moustache-man offers her a Pepsi.

**3.5**

The neighboring couple hosts orgies all week long and annoys the shit out of everybody.

Naomi hates them.

 

**4**

So does John.

They're probably not human after all.

He salts and burns every last drop of Moustache-man’s ‘welcoming’ candy. All of it.

The resulting smoke is so sickly sweet that it bitters the noses of everyone who’s ever smelt it. It glues itself to every possible fiber for days - carpets, sofas, curtains, clothes, eyebrows... None escape its wrath.

Their underwear starts reeking of over-baked fruit loops.

Sam develops a million bitch faces.

 

**5**

It doesn’t help that the amount of weed in his room keeps multiplying, because Ruby.

Sam is trying to get rid of it.

He forks over five packets of it from the slits in the side of his mattress, rustling clumps of green and brown in clear plastic. It’s a good spot. Good enough. There's almost no chance of discovery from anybody else, unless the bed bursts aflame.

Garth, temporarily in town, pays more money than necessary. He says be good.

**6**

Sam is very good, and very patient, when it comes to corroded eyes, disappointed slabs of breath across his face under a roughly pointed hand, and the yelling – keep going, never mention it again, trapped in the same cycle.

He fidgets at the possibility of his father checking up on him properly, for once. He fidgets at the moments of caring, the fleeting halt of a thirst for revenge, and afterwards, at the certainty of John, turning away again, vacating into the distance. A small difference, a variation to neglect after oppression.

Maybe he can say, there's only so much crazy he can take before he turns to selling illicit psychotropic substances in a whole new life of crime.

 

* * *

 

**7**

Piercing gold, and brazen beyond the blinds in the midday melt, the outside light is biting at the eye lids. Uriel stands over him, ghost-like, examining every word that Castiel reads. His pages flutter at the face, swatting at him through the air-con.

The Garrison is cutting corners; they've had problems managing resources ever since Anna left.

Castiel has never done what he was told. Not completely.

They want him to write out a job description.

 

**8**

It’s been a ridiculous day.

Naomi starts it drilling her way through Metatron, and ends it waking up in a puddle of her own blood. She pulls her own spike from her head, sending little droplets rolling free, crookedly down the back of her neck. Red, red, red, she sees; a smidge of a splatter on her shirt, bits of marrow stuck on the table, and bits of zapped green flies stuck on the marrow.

Red, red, red.

She is not amused.

 

**9**

Charlie is departing early.  She shrugs away from the crowd, weaving her elbows rhythmically in a partial dance that begs their retreat. Her Pom-poms bounce across the camera-lens of a boy trying to spot a ghost. Sam is walking her home.

She walks out of the hug when Castiel offers it.

**10**

The coat is too big for him. It sits too widely around the chest, around the shoulders, and it droops, like his face in a moment of leisure.

Castiel stays for the game.

He meets Dean.

His throat feels parched, depleted of voice and moisture alike.

Dean is clean-shaven, his lips wet from drinking.  His jersey rides high over his hips as he jumps, as he swings the planes of his face sharp and clear across the court. His muddy-green eyes pass over the seats on the fourth quarter timeout. Lines of light, bright as rays from a chandelier shades in every cell and shape and space between them.

His soul is blazing.

At the jump in his pulse, Castiel makes several rather confused faces. His tie is adjusted so many times that it twists backwards.

He comes to the conclusion that he's simply indifferent to sexual orientation.

 

**10.5**

It’s not a big deal, really, until he registers the flower petals trailing after Dean's basketball.* His eyes stagger. He flies after him.

 

**11**

"We need to talk, Dean. Alone." says Castiel, ignoring the dripping, holy water off the tips of his hair, the bitter taste of salt in his mouth, and the multiple stab wounds in his coat.

From left of the sidewalk rise shadows of feathers over the slope, mangled and thin. The silver plated knife rattles at his feet.

 

**11.5**

"They go after first borns," he warns. "Don't say yes!"

**12**

The creak of the door lowers in pitch behind Naomi as she steps in, backlit by the dying day.

Charlie is upstairs, locked in by her own design.

They do not say hello.

She looks at the empty bowl of pasta on the table; Castiel snatches it swiftly to run under the sink. He walks past the couples therapy leaflets in the bin, beneath the fruit peels and the fractured veins of the last salad. The table cloth is terribly creased.

 _Edges, edges, edges_ , he thinks. "What should I do with the fae?"

He almost flinches as the familiar wash of static seeps through his mind.

"Kill them," Naomi swivels.

She's out before nightfall.

**13**

“Thud!” says the wall, preceding a peculiar sound of friction generally achieved when items are slammed into it and dragged dazedly upwards across its surface.

Castiel jerks awake.

He sees Dean, suspended in the air, back pressed against the ceiling in a sea of ex-roses.

 _Hello, Dean_ , says his mind, groggy and water-logged. It processes a spectacular rain of red.

A strange feeling settles over him.

He finds his lungs twisting. In the next moment his breath is cut off, trapping itself somewhere beneath the throat. He coughs. Something impossibly thick and foggy crowds itself into his airway, giving him the sensations of being squeezed into a vice.

He rears back into the mattress, left arm thrown across his chest. Panicked lungs, demanding air, begin rejecting it upon its own efforts. Little is relieved. For a few seconds, there's nothing but seizes and  heaves, until he tastes a flavor like perfume, and then coughs as rose petals spill from his mouth, drifting their way down the chin. His eyes tape themselves open, reflecting crimson on blue.

Good thing angels don’t need to breathe.

"Son of a bitch," mutters Dean, suddenly snapping to attention, “Fucking fairies!”

 

**13.5**

No, Dean _does not_ want to be the chosen one.

**14**

They chase him in showers of giggles and multi-pitched whispers. "Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild."

Castiel follows, gasping and vomiting flowers along the way.They plunge him through a fence in the breeze, a rough draft gathering breath. Uprooted thorns tear at his face.

When he fumbles his reach to mocking laughter, he finds hands squirming down his throat. He hadn't anticipated the strength.

His shirt is gone, and so's his coat. He hears Dean in the kitchen, waltzing away from glowing lights.

"Oh come on!" snarls Dean. "I'm a legal adult. Just because I'm not 21 yet..." He swings a punch into one of their faces, and shuts one in the microwave. Translucent wings tumble into his nose as he sets it to bake.The door swings shut.

Five seperate arms wrap around his joints, dragging his kicks into the bathroom.

**15**

It doesn’t look like anything on TV. Drowning doesn’t look like drowning at all.

The screams bob astray, strangely absent, like noises in space. Physiologically impossible in the reach of audibility, they form mute bubbles at best.

As the head thrashes up, down, too rapidly to breathe in, and then out, and then shout, the palms instinctively press into the surface, forcing leverage, barely existent, to lift the head. There is no waving, signaling, or speaking before breathing. Silence often pervades the process.

This rings true especially when one finds most of their appendages immovable, and magnetically held to the bottom of a warming bathtub.

 _Oh shit_ , thinks Dean, as the reflections above overwrite themselves in floating clusters of red. At least when the water boils he can die simmering in the fragrance of Turkish delight.

**16**

He dreams of an arm latching onto his shoulder, raising him up, up, and up.

  **__ **

**16.5**

Two fingers over the top of his forehead send him shivering against the ground. His clothes are inexplicably dry.

"More of them-" Castiel rasps, as he cooks every fairy that he can spot into even chunkier salsa via the glowy fingertips of doom. The room spins and rocks beneath his feet. He figures that whichever spells had hit him would make him want to puke his guts out for the rest of the night.

**17**

Sam gains the most immovable eyebrows ever. His face is lopsided.

“You realize if you let them abduct you, you can live forever, right? Are you sure you don’t want that?"

He finds the journal wrenched from his grip in a heartbeat, very smoothly.

“Shut up.”

Charlie steals the Journal from Dean.

Castiel continues choking in the background.

 

* * *

 

**16.7**

_It’s all rather impressive, grants the Hermione figurine, how remarkably well Charlie is taking this._

_For a certain definition of well._

_Her family carries shredded wings on their backs, the world is a loony bin, and she thinks that the situation’s brighter than an overcharged Lumos._

**18**

Really now, the nerve of it all.

Metatron’s officially bad news for absolutely everybody - he’s setting himself up as the new Christ. Crowley creases his forehead into six separate rectangles. He’s a born director; he’s not having any of this.

A lovely old tart named Naomi calls in, and they spend the rest of their hate affair trading passive aggressive snark, arm crosses, and manipulation.

Metatron may be in the wind for now, but he will definitely, greatly enjoy getting nailed by the king.

 

**19**

“I take it he's got a thing for guns,” says Charlie, lifting the spell book amongst rows and rows of them. She pouts when there’s no Ak-47 in sight.

**20**

The floor is seasoned in swathes of scattered salt, and sugar. They take arms – iron crows, and a silver letter opener.

Sam chants a spell, turns on his puppy eyes, and hypnotically enslaves all of the fairies.

 

**20.5**

Which is why there are now winged, vorcha-necked goblins giving them free barrel rolls 300 feet up from the Grand Canyon. It’s the only reason they can generate at least, subconscious desires and all that.

Charlie whoops in pure glee, “This is real life?!”

Sam shrugs. The wind that tosses over his head puts 9487 shampoo commercials to shame.

There is so much beauty in the world.

**22**

Castiel’s upper body is pumped and glistening in sweat. He sorely misses the top half of his clothes.

Dean props him up by the arm, grinning. “You got any papers?”

“In the cigar box,” he replies. He stares off into the middle distance.

Dean rolls up a joint.

****

**_21_ **

_“Do you party?”_

_“Excuse me?” says Castiel, head tilting to the right._

_“Do you get high?”_

****

* * *

  ****

**_23_ **

It hangs in the air, a beat of the clock suspended on the first inhale. The jaw drops, the head is thrown back. Crow’s feet land around the eyes, focus washing away in artificial happiness.

He giggles into Dean’s face as it’s jutted erratically into different positions. Dean slurs a few "what"s in confusion.

“You have…Faith,” gasps Castiel.

 _The silent trust of a father lighting a life on memory, engulfed by the mission - saving people, a soldier, enlisted at four, by purpose . It’s there_ , he notes, leaning back on the chair.

He longs for it.

****

**23.5**

The early stages of not-quite self-fulfillment: Tracing shapes of footsteps, scribbles of pizza men behind churning smoke. Sight - wrapped in swarms of bees picking sweetness from the ordinary. Roots - growing beneath the heels, unnoticed, used to the parasitic drain of movement.

Molding another sleepwalker through life, volitional choice minimal, is effortless; simply drape familiarity, irresponsibility, and the bigger picture in the name of duty. God has been gone for a long time now, but the production of shallow glee and mindlessness has never ceased.

If he stops, reasons Castiel, maybe he’ll never have to start up again.

**24**

Dean doesn't care about anything. He repeats this wondrously, numb and gratified. He thinks that he’s a hero. He sets his own priorities, and he knows he’s cool under his ludicrous masculine posturing.

Castiel thinks.

Castiel thinks that he’s ashamed.

His heart was never in his orders. Not completely.

 

**25**

Vague guilt pools in his veins, sinking into his skin like suggillation.

On his hasty retreat, he spots Naomi with the rivalry intelligence, _working with a demon_.

He declares his entire workplace corrupt and ragequits.

 

Naomi doesn’t get to tell him what to do. Ever again.

**26**

He doesn’t know what he’s going to do.

 

 

Isn’t that amazing?

* * *

**27**

"You're not a freak," says Dean.

"You're not a freak," says Charlie.

"You're just a total whackjob who measures their hair every morning. Seriously, he keeps a ruler by the bedside table and oomph-"

Sam elbows him.

He doesn't care if he's always going to be one inside.

Sam wants to be like other people. He's going to be a lawyer.

 

**28**

Or maybe he’ll start with art history.

 

The figure in front holds himself rigid, throat bobbing a little too hard at the swallow.

John chokes, "Get out."

 

**30**

He tells Dean to watch out for Sammy.

 

  ** _29_ **

_His voice echoes through the lock._

_“If you walk out that door, don’t you ever come back.”_

 

 

**31**

The world hasn’t fallen, and their positions are out.

On the table lie divorce papers, stainless, straight and crisp, meticulously stacked.

All custody issues have been arranged, at a speed only achievable by a very precise mixture of spell work, bribery and threats.

Naomi doesn't know whether she'll finish this alive, but she’s damn well making sure that the threat will be neutralized.

* * *

 

  **32**

Dean is in the bathroom, gurgling mouthwash to the tune of 'All Right Now'.

"Talk to me, Cas. How are you?" asks Dean, voice left over from 5 minutes ago, muffled in turkey sandwich.  He’s drowned out by the trembling of the windows in the thunder.

The clouds outside are cement-stained, visibility impaired by flashing chips of rain. They rumble again in the abrasive dank. Castiel blinks.

He registers impatience; Dean had stuffed himself, hurriedly, as though his plate would evaporate the instant that he slowed down. He’s starved before, Castiel realizes, or he hasn’t been fed regularly for ages.

The thought of producing more sandwiches plagues his mind as he tries for a final answer. "I'm great," he drums his fingers on the table. ”I'm great." 

Castiel says it very, very flatly.

 

**33**

"I'm great," he repeats to himself, over and over again, until John comes in and shoots him, over, and over, and over again.

 

**34**

Castiel huddles over the table.

The pain expands whenever he breathes, inhaling metallic impressions of boiled mushrooms.

Oct-1-en-3-one. A decomposition reaction to oils on skin. 

He watches the statements in his head turn into questions, into doubts, into judgements, dissolving into the back of his neck. _ _Damaged, cracked, desertion,__ sings the choir. A paralysing bruise covering a burning tinge. _ _  
__

He can’t make himself stop.

 

**34.5**

He wonders why the holes in his new overcoat are so upsetting.

 

**35**

John exits the red door in slow even strides, shoulders cutting the wind. Mud strips, rust and Orchre, layered thick squelch under the boots like beaten cloth. The raw rose of his lips, and his black, matted lashes are thoroughly drenched like the back of his shirt.

Beads of water roll off of his cheeks. He’s stopped shaking.

He doesn’t remember the hug, the open hand on the back of his neck, the subsequent warm, mobile kiss, or why he’d arrived here at all.

  **35.5**

Castiel gets better.

 

 

  **36**

“You _neutralized_ him. Like Superman to Louis Lane,” says Dean dumbly, as he processes exactly why Castiel had been making out with his dad.

“What the hell?!”

“He wouldn’t stop shooting me. Dean.”

He nets a freezing pause. Dean’s gaze flickers sideways.

“Ok, so I might’ve mumbled something about pumping fairies full of iron, and that you showed me your wings. Guess he got the wrong message.” he gabbles, rubbing his fist on his thigh.

Castiel frowns, head drooping in irritation.

Dean scratches at the empty response. “What? I was really stoned.”

 

Their voices fall away.

 

* * *

 

**37**

Nobody is to follow John. It’s been made explicitly clear.

**37.5**

It's much too dangerous, murky in the shadow of death's embrace.

 

John has found it - the thing with the yellow eyes.

Ice trickles down his spine; he sweats in the cold. His legs are weighted.

He hoists himself upright, struggling one limb at a time. He feels every knuckle and every shift of his joints as he staggers forward, his grip on the Colt unbearably tense.

 

**38**

He wakes up in a crevice, bleeding.

It isn't felt.

He uses his hate as a salve for decreased perfusion and evaporation of sweat, hoping with all his might that it isn’t another empty gesture.

He imagines the end - a ghost, and her long, homebound soul inflicting herself upon his fevered mind, coaxing it outwards, sending it racing away from its own body into shock. He imagines the hug that has him freezing to death at room temperature, welcoming him back, breeding one more spirit so virulent that it can shred flesh.

The mirage of one Mary Winchester lingers over him, silent and disjointed.

She looks more repressed than he can remember.

**39**

They're running away to Stanford - Dean, Cas, Sam, and Charlie.

How the latter managed to beat Sam’s overall grade by a tenth remains a mystery, although she insists on a lack of cheating.

 

**39.5**

And then they lived awkwardly ever after, for whatever four years is worth.

 

* * *

 

**40**

John murders the fuck out of Azazel.

 

**The End.**

 

\---

The lineup:

  * Angela Hayes – Dean Winchester
  * Barbara Fitts – Mary Winchester
  * Buddy Kane – Crowley
  * Carolyn Burnham – Naomi
  * Col. Frank Fitts – John Winchester
  * Fairies – Torchwood fairies
  * Jane Burnham – Charlie Bradbury
  * Jim Berkley and Jim Olmeyer – Gabriel and Balthazar
  * Lester Burnham – Castiel
  * Ricky Fitts – Sam Winchester



\---

 * A careful look at the school’s enrollment records will yield that unlike Sam, any mention of Dean, the emergency extra is entirely absent. He’d merely bluffed his way in to hit a kink of the coach’s sister, who he then never spoke to again.


End file.
